Museum and Societyhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas
<p><span>Museum and Society is an independent peer-reviewed journal which brings together new writing by academics and museum professionals on the subject of museums.<br /></span></p>en-USAll papers will be made available under a Creative Commons (cc-by) licence unless previous agreements dictate otherwiseert@le.ac.uk (The Editors)rcp16@le.ac.uk (Rob Pearce & William Farrell)Fri, 14 Jul 2017 11:18:04 +0000OJS 2.4.5.0http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss60Oh [Queer] Pioneers! Narrating Queer Lives in Virtual Museumshttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/827
<p>This study examines the current approach of virtual museums in presenting the lives of queer subjects, especially when a subject’s queerness is either almost completely obscured or seriously misrepresented in favor of a less controversial, more readily marketable version. Examining the Willa Cather Foundation virtual museum, this study critiques the selective erasure of various facets of historic figures’ lives and explores alternative approaches to reconcile similar situations.</p><p><br />Key Words: queer theory, virtual house museums, Willa Cather</p>Joshua Adairhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/827Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Opening Spaces of Resistance in the Corporatized Cultural Institution: Liberate Tate and the Art Not Oil Coalitionhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/828
<p>In the current economic climate where state subsidies for the arts have been steadily eroded, there is a consensus in support of the good of corporate sponsorship for cultural institutions. This article seeks to problematize this consensus by critiquing the strategies that corporations employ in their sponsorship agreements with public cultural institutions and opening up a discussion around the ethical issues this poses for their recipients. It then examines how a coalition of subversive arts collectives, that come together under the banner ‘Art Not Oil’, have begun to successfully shatter this consensus through a sustained campaign of unauthorized live art interventions enacted inside cultural institutions. It argues that the unique strategy of resistance they employ operates at an interstitial distance to the public cultural institutions they target, from where they open up spaces of resistance ultimately capable of rewriting the cultural sectors’ corporatized value system.</p><p><br />Key Words: Corporate sponsorship, Public cultural sector, Liberate Tate, Simon Critchley, Interstitial distance</p>Emma Mahonyhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/828Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Practice Makes ‘Museum People’https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/829
<p>This article examines how museum work is evaluated, and how it affects museum professionals’ identities. The empirical material consists of biographical interviews of Finnish museum professionals. The key concept for the analysis is ‘museum people’, which represents the ideal museum workers. As a community of practice ‘museum people’ are defined by what they do – ‘proper’ museum work. Analyzing the defining practices and elements of the community also reveals that it is placed in a time and space of its own. Reflecting oneself to ‘museum people’ and their practices can be elemental for the identity work of a museum professional.</p><p><br />Keywords: Museum work, practices, community of practice, professional identity</p>Inkeri Hakamieshttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/829Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Gendered Representations of Apartheid: The Women’s Jail Museum at Constitution Hillhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/830
<p>This article examines the ways in which women are represented and remembered at The Women’s Jail at Constitution Hill museum, a former women’s jail that was used to incarcerate women during apartheid in Johannesburg, South Africa. Based on fieldwork at the museum, this study examines how the memory of the former prisoners and of the apartheid regime is shaped and narrated at this site. Situating our analysis within the context of the collective memory of apartheid, we examine how the museum uses artifacts and objects to depict both the specific forms of gendered dehumanization that women experienced at the jail, as well as their journeys to incarceration as a result of discriminatory apartheid laws. We also examine the absence of torture memory and references to hierarchical structures and interactions within the jail itself, noting that these were important dynamics of prison life that are not represented in the museum. This research presents a content and visual analysis of how the use of images and artifacts may illuminate and/or silence specific memories of degradation and humiliation in a museum space.</p><p>Key Words: Collective Memory, Museums, Representation, South Africa, Apartheid<br />Memorialization, Gender and Memorialization</p>Stephanie Bonnes, Janet Jacobshttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/830Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000“I ♥ Skagens Museum”: Patterns of Interaction in the Institutional Facebook Communication of Museumshttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/831
<p>Facebook has often been hailed for affording participation and thus for representing an opportunity for institutions to interact with the public. However, research concerning how institutions are actualizing this communicative opportunity is still scarce. In this article, we seek to address this gap by investigating empirically how one type of institution, namely museums, and their Facebook followers, actually communicate. Our approach is innovative in combining analytical tools from speech act theory and Conversation Analysis (CA) to a corpus of activities from the Facebook pages of nine Danish museums of different types and sizes collected during eight consecutive weeks in 2013. This approach enables us to both investigate communicative actions as isolated speech acts and the micromechanics of the interaction that potentially arise from these actions. Our findings indicate that certain kinds of speech act are used more than others and that certain speech acts lead to more interaction than others. By analyzing a fairly standard example of museum/follower interaction, we show how different kinds of micro conversational dynamics play out. In light of this analysis, we ask what modes of participation the interaction affords and we discuss the implications of our findings for recent debates about how museums can adapt to the participatory paradigm underlying institutional Facebook communication.</p><p>Key Words: Social media communication, Facebook, speech acts, conversation analysis,<br />institutional communication, museums</p>Ditte Laursen, Christian Hviid Mortensen, Anne Rørbæk Olesen, Kim Christian Schrøderhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/831Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000‘I think I know a little bit about that anyway, so it’s okay’: Museum visitor strategies for disengaging with confronting mental health materialhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/839
<p>Visitor engagement at museums is an area that has received significant attention from museum practitioners and academics over the last decade. However, very few studies have sought to understand how and why visitors may actively employ strategies to shut down attempts to elicit deep emotional engagement with museum material and messages. This paper looks at an exhibition in a major museum in Australia that discusses mental health and illness. It discusses the high rates of emotional disengagement that were found amongst 172 visitors who were faced with emotionally confronting material and argues that emotions enabled, as well as hindered, constructive, critical reflection amongst visitors.</p><p><br />Key words: Mental-health, Museums, Engagement, Disengagement, Empathy</p>Lachlan Dudleyhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/839Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000‘The house’ as a framing device for public engagement in STEM museumshttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/833
<p>In the last five to ten years, several science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) museums have been experimenting with new forms of public engagement, aiming to be places for curiosity-driven investigation of the cultures of science via multiple perspectives, bringing artists, scientists, researchers, clinicians, members of the public and others together. Yet these diverse and rapidly evolving sites lack a clear definition of their family resemblances – something we argue is crucial for better understanding, advocating, and evaluating what they do. As a starting point for this definitional project we propose ‘the house’ as a metaphor and framing device for public engagement in STEM museums, grounded in experiences at Medical Museion in Denmark and Wellcome Collection in the UK. We further suggest that a Goldilocks principle – the notion of lying between two poles of a continuum in a ‘just right’ position – captures several key features of what it is about the idea of a house that resonates with the approach to public engagement in these museums.</p><p><br />Key words: STEM museums, science communication, public engagement, house.</p>Louise Whiteley, Anette Stenslund, Ken Arnold, Thomas Söderqvisthttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/833Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Objects as identity markers – Ways of mediating the past in a South Sámi and Norse borderlandhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/834
<p>Museums have several means of communicating with their audiences. The problems discussed here concern how local museums interact with their audience when the past they want to portray is multiple, complex and sometimes disputed. It is based on an analysis of three exhibitions in local museums situated in a region where archaeological findings indicate that the South Sámi have been present since the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age. It highlights the various ways in which the pluralistic past in the region is being portrayed by asking whether its history appears as neutralized, i.e. transmitted in passive impartial terms, or is exoticized, repressed or mediated through other images. The one common identity marker the three exhibitions share, although portrayed in different ways and with different effects, is the gåetie, a turf hut in common use in the South Sámi region. A tendency to neutralize the multiple and complex past in the South Sámi region takes place, either by operating in a form of ‘timeless past‘ or by referring to a shared ‘far away past‘ as fishers and hunters. By barely mentioning cultural encounters, the South Sámi and the Norse are primarily presented as ethnic groups who have lived isolated and independent of each other.</p><p>Key words: disputed heritage; identity markers; South Sámi; perceptions of the past; museum exhibitions</p>Grete Swensenhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/834Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Review Article: Resistant visitors and the development of empathyhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/835
<p>Rose, Julia. <em>Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites</em>. Lanham, Maryland:<br />Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2016, paperback £23.95, hardback £49.95, pp. xvi+215.</p><p><br />Gokcigdem, Elif M. <em>Fostering Empathy Through Museums</em>. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman<br />&amp; Littlefield, 2016, paperback £29.95, hardback £65, pp. xxxii+296.</p>Amy Levinhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/835Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000Elizabeth Hallam, Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayedhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/836
Elizabeth Hallam, Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed, London: Reaktion Books, 2016, hardback £35.00, pp. viii+444Margaret Werryhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/836Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Brian Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropologyhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/837
Brian Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016, paperback £26.95, pp. xiii+491Richard Fallonhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/837Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls, Exhibiting Europe in Museums. Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives and Representationshttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/838
<p>Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls, <em>Exhibiting Europe in</em><br /><em>Museums. Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives and Representations</em>, New<br />York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016 [hardback 2014], paperback £24.00, pp. viii+238.</p>Johannes Zechnerhttps://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/838Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000